Automobiles and other vehicles typically include seat assemblies which accommodate more than one person sitting in an upright position. When these seat assemblies are not occupied by their intended number of upright-sitting people, they may include enough lateral space for a single person to lie down horizontally, i.e., in a sleeping or horizontal resting position. However, this potential of a multi-person vehicle seat assembly to allow a person to lie down is typically very difficult to utilize in a safe manner.
For example, typical passenger restraint systems, e.g., conventional seat belts, are only designed to safely restrain a person when that person is in an upright or sitting position. Such typical passenger restraint systems do not even attempt to address the problem of safely restraining a person in a lying down position. Attempts to directly address the problem of restraining a person in the lying down position have critical shortcomings. For example, in the case of U.S. Pat. No. 5,131,682, the shown apparatus appears to provide little restraint, and is furthermore not securely attached to the passenger. In the case of U.S. Pat. No. 6,217,069, the shown apparatus is an unwieldy combination of belts which may be difficult for the passenger to arrange correctly, and which may undesirably limit the movement of the passenger when in the lying down position.
There is also a further problem that is not addressed by either conventional seat belts or the above-identified apparatuses for restraining passengers in the lying down position. That is, during the course of a trip in the vehicle, and possibly even many times over the course of the trip, a passenger may desire to switch between the upright and lying down positions. However, this is not possible in the case of either conventional seat belts or the above-identified apparatuses because both conventional seat belts and the above-identified apparatuses are directed to restraining a passenger only in one or the other of the upright and lying down positions. Neither conventional seat belts nor the above-identified apparatuses provide a device that allows a passenger to switch between the upright and lying down positions without necessitating that the passenger release themselves from the restraint system to do so, which is undesirably dangerous during the course of a trip in the vehicle.